


And It's An Even Sum

by YourFadedGlory (HisNameWasAce)



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, I gave Agent Galaga a backstory and regret nothing, M/M, Minor Original Character(s), Tony and Bruce make a brief cameo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-04 10:05:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6653497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HisNameWasAce/pseuds/YourFadedGlory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Agent Hansen a Technological Engineer who excelled at getting his paperwork in on time and playing video games on the job. </p><p>That was who he was. What he had been before Tony Stark had shouted “That man is playing Galaga!” </p><p>Everything after that, it's all down hill.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And It's An Even Sum

**Author's Note:**

>  
> 
> **“I am one of billions. I am stardust gathered fleetingly into form. I will be ungathered. The stardust will go on to be other things someday and I will be free.”  
> **  
>  _— Laini Taylor, Days of Blood & Starlight_  
> 

There is a before and there is an after. His therapist suggests he not draw such definite lines, but it seems impossible not to. Before, he was Kasey Hansen, Agent Kasey Hansen. He came from modest stock, an elementary school teacher and hardware store owner, both of whom struggled to rear a child that had shown such a proclivity for technology at such an early age. No television remote had been safe, no school computer untampered with. It had been a moment of immense pride and subtle relief when MIT had taken him off their hands.

SHIELD had found him his sophomore year, they did not appreciate his hacking their systems. He hadn’t been looking for anything in particular, just lonely and bored with more Mountain Dew in his system than sleep. Before the combat boots and rifles had stormed his shoebox of an apartment he’d found a file on an incident labeled _The Food Fight of 89_ that had kept him mildly entertained until an unassuming bald man with round rimless glasses put him in cuffs and ordered his band of merry ninjas to take anything with an internet connection, including his supped up Gameboy.

He called himself Sitwell, the bald man in his suit and glasses. For someone who looked no more intimidating than the everyday accountant seen bustling along Boylston, he sure was menacing when he pulled a blackout hood over his head and shoved him in a van. Kasey never figured out where he was taken, just a nondescript gray room with a steel table and a pair of steel chairs sat on opposite sides.

The man who removed the bag was not Sitwell, this one had a head of brown hair and a soft smile that glowed fiercely under the harsh fluorescent lighting. Kasey, no matter how hard he tried, would never forget the first words he said to Agent Coulson. “Please, _please_ don’t go through my porn file.” That, that had garnered pause from a man he would later learn was believed to be unflappable. Kasey would never know if it was the utter desperation in his tone, how tears flooded his eyes, or the red hot stain of shame on his cheeks that caught Coulson off guard.

“I didn’t mean any harm, I swear the only thing I got access to was the file about the food fight.” He’d blathered, cheeks wet and chest heaving a bit erratically. “Please, I promise I won’t go anywhere near your server again. Just don’t open that file.” It was hours, _hours_ of moaning men balls deep in other men. A digital spank bank that had kept his relentless teenage-something libido just barely sated.

There was no way to explain to his devoutly religious mother that, no, Joanna Mercer had not been his girlfriend, that he’d paid her the hundred dollars in his measly savings account to be his date to the senior prom and five dollars extra for every picture she’d posed for at their house and at the dance. No way to tell his father that his only child, his only son, had wanted to date the star quarterback more than he’d wanted to be him.

To Coulson’s credit, the moment of hesitation lasted no more than a blink of his watery eyes.

“No one is going to go through those files Mr. Hansen, or at least not that particular one.” Coulson had vowed, pulling a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and putting it in his cuffed hands. “However, I would like to ask how you got into _our_ files.”

Kasey told him.

Everything.

From the two-thirds liter of Mountain Dew weighing heavy in his bladder to the number of keystrokes it’d taken him to get past the firewall. He’d expected to be laughed at, for Sitwell to come back and string him up by his toes. What he got was a business card and another van ride with a blackout bag over his head. In his shoebox apartment his computer and Gameboy had been returned, the door replaced, and with a few taps at his keyboard it was revealed that while SHIELD had poked through everything from his homemade antivirus to his calculus homework, the one thing that had remained untouched in their digital tear down was the file labeled _Personal_.

A year later, graduated early and with honors, he sat down at the same steel table and signed himself over to SHIELD. They put him in a class with other whip smart techies like Lucy and Felix, taught them to scale walls and fire guns, to thrive under pressure and hold their tongues under threat. Mud stained, exhausted, and delirious from a lack of caffeine…it was the most fun he’d ever had. They gave him a badge that dubbed him a part of something bigger than himself, Agent Hansen of Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.

That’s who he was, he’d seen his file. Agent Hansen a Technological Engineer who excelled at getting his paperwork in on time and playing video games on the job. He was known to associate closely with fellow engineers Lucille Ratliff and Felix Delacruz. Recruited after hacking SHIELD serves, with the personal recommendation from Agent Coulson himself. He always took the same lunch and dinner breaks aboard the Helicarrier, had a noted shellfish allergy, and at the request of Agent Coulson had undergone two years of intensive therapy upon his admittance to the academy to help him understand and accept his sexuality.

That was who he was. What he had been before Tony Stark had shouted “That man is playing Galaga!”

* * *

 

Kasey had hastily switched his screens, waiting for Doctor Banner to escort the loud mouthed and apparently hypervigilant billionaire from the deck before he switched back. Three chairs down Lucy snickered, Felix grinning down at his keyboard like the two of them hadn’t been playing Pacman and Tetris respectively.

“Shut up.” Kasey had hissed, kicking at the wheels of Felix’s chair. Maria had silently cuffed him over the back of the head and that’s was that. He went back to playing, checking his data intermediately while he waited for one o’clock to roll around so he could take his usual lunch. Jeff would be coming on shift, the hottest cafeteria chef to ever exist, and the target of his pitiful mealtime pining.

Because Murphy couldn’t stand to be wrong and Finagle refused to be out done—at fifteen minutes till, with a high score looming, his beloved ‘before’ ended in a blast of shattered glass and white hot flames.

In the _after_ as he calls it, much to his therapist’s dismay, a lot of things happen. He picks himself up off the floor, glass cutting into his palms as he scrambled instinctively into a vacant seat to report the damages to a bloodied Agent Hill.

He runs logarithms and formulas at a speed that would have his superiors testing him for the mutant gene if they could spare him the attention, trying to keep the damn Helicarrier in the air.

He sees Felix crawl upright to his knees and gather Lucy into his arms to carry her down toward Medical where they pull shrapnel out of her back and prick the arches of her nerveless feet to determine that one shard cut to close and robbed her of her legs even though they were still whole and attached.

He learns the third level cafeteria was swarmed by hostiles and Chef Jeff Danes with his quick smile and warm brown eyes, led his cook staff, armed with a handful of guns, pots of scalding water, and cutlery on a vicious assault that bought the rest of them precious time. When they found his body, riddled with twelve bullet holes, those brown eyes were still open and his favorite meat cleaver had been in hand.

It hurts.

All of the _after_ hurts. But Fury’s voice in his ear, telling him, telling everyone that _Coulson is down,_ it twists the knife a little deeper. The man who had given him his in at SHIELD, had given him a life beyond reconfiguring television remotes and the fear of his own sexuality was dead—speared like a human kabob by a megalomaniac who had the audacity to call himself a god.

It filled him with rage. Rage that made it all the easier to pick up a fallen gun, take aim at his first target that wasn’t a paper outline, and put a bullet through them. The splatter of red shocks him, if the look on the hostile’s face was any indication, it shocks him too. Kasey’s never shot anyone, not a real person with a real bullet. In retrospect he tells his therapist that he knew, distantly albeit, that he should have felt something when he did it.

Or after.

He should have felt sick, should have given it more than just a passing thought. But he hadn’t, he’d put his finger back to the trigger and fired again. In fact he hadn’t stopped firing until he had run out of bullets. Thirteen shots, six hostiles dead. It didn’t feel like enough, not nearly enough, not for what the bastards had taken from his home, from his _family_.

But it was all he had to give and he’d given it. He’d fought back, something his therapist lauded him for, even if it came with a heavy dose of concern. If she hates the line he’s drawn the before and the after, she hates the line he’s drawn between after and _after_ the after. The line isn’t drawn with an explosion, with a siege that stripped his best friend of her legs or the man he was infatuated with of his life.

No, it’s much, _much_ , worse.

* * *

 

Six months after the Invasion he drinks two-thirds a liter of Mountain Dew, lonely and bored at his monitor. Clicks one file too far, overrides a clearance level he has no business being in and stumbles across a file simply marked T.A.H.I.T.I.

That was the last he told his therapist, on a burner cellphone he’d bought on his one o’clock lunch break, while scrambling to put as much distance between himself and SHIELD as possible. He was loyal, they couldn’t tell him he wasn’t. But there were things too fucked up for Nick Fury to justify, yanking Phillip Coulson back from the depths of death and keeping the team rattled enough by his supposed demise to go to war against an alien army was definitely one of those things.

That was how he ended up here, pale faced and shaking in the lobby of Stark Tower. A disembodied English accented voice ushered him into the elevator and the billionaire himself was waiting for him when the doors dinged open, bags under his eyes and grease on his hands, a curious Bruce Banner hovering at his shoulder.

“Agent Galaga?” Tony asked, the usual levity to his tone.

Kasey flinched slightly at the nickname, grasping for the words to make the other man understand. He stood there long enough, mouth opening and closing uselessly, that the elevator doors started to slide shut and he had to reach out and stop them.

“I think Agent Coulson’s alive.” Kasey finally said, blue eyes a little wild around the edges. “I think Agent Coulson is alive and Barton deserves to know about it.”

That was the beginning of the after, after, _after_.

**Author's Note:**

> I re-watched the Avengers and could not get Galaga Guy out of my head. So I gave him a name and this is what he became. Honestly this all felt a bit scattered, but I felt like sitting down and writing and not caring what came of it. I like it well enough to post and I hope someone else will to. I'd LOVE your feedback (good or bad) on it, on him, whether or not you'd like to see this continued with more structure to it.Thanks for reading!


End file.
